Ray Bradbury said, “Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.”

The Fundraising Volume Machine read that as permission to send more appeals and chase donors around the internet with a butterfly net. Bradbury meant creative production, not contact frequency.

There are three very different kinds of quantity in fundraising:

1. Quantity of practice. More work, paired with feedback, should improve the work.
2. Quantity of ideas. More genuinely different ideas give you more chances to find a strong one.
3. Quantity of fundraising. More names, appeals and asks may produce more attributed revenue. They do not necessarily produce better fundraising, better donors or much learning.

The first two tend to improve quality as a natural byproduct, the third?  Not so much.

Saturday Night Live develops dozens of possible sketches for each show. Roughly eight make it to air, and if two are memorable it’s a home run. Fundraising has an even larger cutting-room floor.  Consider a direct-mail package with six elements: outer-envelope format, callout, letter, image, reply form and insert. Come up with three possibilities for each and you already have 729 potential packages.

Increase the choices from three to four and the number jumps to 4,096. Add channels, offers, messengers, asks and audience segments, and your brainstorming session has morphed into a combinatorial nightmare.

The problem is rarely a shortage of possible ideas. It’s deciding which tiny handful deserve donor exposure and testing dollars.

Behavioral science helps us create better candidates. Instead of relying on taste, precedent or whatever someone saw in another charity’s package, we build hypotheses around evidence. Would an identity-based message outperform a generic appeal? Would supporting donor autonomy work better than pressure?

That improves the pile, but it doesn’t tell us what to choose. The customary selection method is a meeting in which six people offer opinions until the person with the largest title develops remarkably good taste.

We use experimental pre-testing instead. Different elements are systematically varied and shown to the target audience. Their choices let us estimate which elements add value, which subtract it and which combinations are strongest.

Quantity of ideas supplies the raw material, evidence improves the pile and experimental selection decides what earns a live test.

Bradbury was advocating creative abundance but turning him into the patron saint of the 12th annual appeal seems unfair to the man.

Kevin

P.S. Here’s an archived webinar explaining how the pre-testing works: https://youtu.be/VfDv8NuVo94